regular performance of their sacred functions. For things of minor note people had not recourse to materials of such costliness. On a board, or simply on a wall whitened with chalk, they wrote in black or red what they wished to advertise: the letting of a suite of rooms 'at the Kalends of July or the Ides of August,' the announcement of a show 'which will take place, weather permitting or without fail,' and, more often still, an election address; the election decided and the candidate returned or rejected, a new coat is put over the tablet, and it will serve for the candidate of the following year; advertisements of this nature are very numerous at Pompeii.
The abundance of placards in the Roman towns is easily accounted for by the very conditions of ancient life. We know that the ancients never had much taste for home life, and spent most of their time in the Forum, enjoying the sights afforded by the public place. In these long promenades the placards naturally attracted their eyes; they stopped to read them, and it was one of the habitual occupations of their idle days. Things have altered very much in our modern societies; we are readier to stay at home, and we have much more to do there. Time and opportunity fail us for sauntering about the streets and surveying the walls; and so it has come about that, as we no longer go to find placards, the placards have come to find us.
This little revolution was accomplished by means of journalism. There was in Paris at the beginning of the seventeenth century a man of singularly active and audacious genius, replete with ideas, very much in advance of his time, who incessantly pondered over some new invention, the physician Théophraste Renaudot. On May 30, 1631, he had published the first in day of French periodicals, the Gazette, which scored a great success from the start. However, this success was far from satisfying him. The Gazette more especially addressed the curious and the politicians, and supplied them with official news of France and abroad. Renaudot wished to undertake a more serviceable than brilliant enterprise, by which every one would profit: in the middle of Paris he estab-
